The take-away from the four years of turmoil in Stockton that followed the onset of the Great Recession: At bottom, it was all about selfishness.

Not the legitimate self-interest of a person, a public employee union, a developer, a business leader. Self-interest commandeering the system.

When selfishness is institutionalized, taxpayers stop being citizens to serve or to honorably profit from. They become a feeding tube to be inserted by City Hall.

In Stockton, that moment predated the recession by decades.

The recession merely exposed a truth President Franklin D. Roosevelt uttered years ago: "We have always known that heedless self interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics."

Over the past few years, I have had hundreds of encounters with a certain type of public employee, fortunately a dwindling breed, for whom selfishness is a religion. It has been like a mind meld with the municipal id, a place where individual desires morph into self-serving public policy.

It is a post-fact world. To them, what is true does not conform to budget reality; what is true is what supports their interests.

The same with ethics. If it's good for them, it's good. If it's bad for them, it's bad.

In maybe 400 substantial communications with this ilk over four years, not one has ever presented me with a plan that would preserve the compensation they demanded.

They demanded it anyway. They demand blood from a stone then denounce the stone for its incompetence at hemorrhaging.

And by the way, if you disagree with them, you're a bad person.

In their solipsistic view, the courageous council members who faced fiscal reality and made tough reforms are buffoons.

They hate the council for relegating public employees to the role of employees, a stinging demotion from managers of the city treasury.

The highly competent city manager enacting this agenda is destroying the city, they venomously charge. Though really he just enacts the council's policy.

It's as if they don't understand how city government works. Because they don't - they've never seen city government work as it should.

In their experience, a city manager has always been an innumerate cream puff who unfailingly sends them away richer, regardless of the cost.

They learned to live in budget La-La Land.

The genius of this country is that the framers saw them coming.

"It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government," James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers. "But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?"

Institutions are our lengthened shadows; human weakness part of our institutions; so we spend our whole lives fighting the institutions we ourselves create.

Or you do if we're worth your salt.

The recession just administered the fiscal coup de gras to a rotten civic culture.

But the budget crisis also birthed a culture of solvency and - this'll get me laughed out of town - honorable public service.

Humbled leaders have been forced to recognize that for a city to flourish its fiscal lifeblood must flow through all its limbs, not just the outstretched palm.

That's what really galls the selfish: In Stockton, a place where the weak tissue of a distressed body politic long hosted the virus of self-enriching special interests, the recession stung the public out of its indifference and the majority asserted its will.

Small wonder that dozens of the paycheck posse are leaving town.

It would be remiss not to acknowledge that many public employees have been part of the solution. Even many who never got a ticket on the gravy train accepted cuts to help a city they love.

Thanks in part to them, government has become fiscally responsible, at least for the time being. Civic culture has regained some noble purpose.

That means the nadir of the city's fortunes is also the beginning of its return as a thriving city. If the change upsets the disgruntled, boo hoo hoo.